


The Interview

by hufflepuff_hipster



Category: RandL - Fandom, Rhett & Link, rhink - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Anxiety, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Interviews, M/M, Rough Kissing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-06
Updated: 2017-03-06
Packaged: 2018-09-28 16:03:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,576
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10133144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hufflepuff_hipster/pseuds/hufflepuff_hipster
Summary: Rhett and Link are interviewed by a magazine following a scandal in which a fan leaks a suggestive photo of the two in an embrace. Plenty of angst, tension, kissing, and fluff. My first fic on this site! :DNothing is meant to be implied about any real people - this is all in good fun.





	

Link was always the nervous one when it came to interviews with press, but this particular interview had him in shambles. While he sat on the couch next to Rhett, waiting for the magazine interviewer to enter the room, his knees were shaking so badly that he knew it had to be noticeable. He didn’t know what to do with his hands. He adjusted his glasses. Cleared his throat. Fixed his hair. Adjusted his glasses again. He eventually settled on interlocking his hands in his lap and trying to just breathe in and out at a normal pace.

Rhett was nervous for once too. He rubbed his sweaty palms over his pants. He chanced a glance over at Link, who met his gaze. They sighed anxiously in unison.

Link got to his feet abruptly and ran a shaky hand through his black coif. He turned to Rhett and said, “I don’t know man. Maybe we should call this interview off.” He sounded very much like someone who was on the verge of completely losing his grip.

Rhett was annoyed. He had been trying to remain calm for the both of them, but now with Link freaking out like this, it made him feel even less tethered to the ground. He just wanted everything to be normal again.

“Look, just calm down, please.” 

Rhett gestured for Link to sit back down, which he did. The brunet put his head between his knees and buried his face in his hands. 

“Ughhh, I can’t do this,” Link whined. 

Rhett was trying not to let his temper flare. He had to be calm if he was ever going to get Link to go through with this interview. 

“Link, we’re been over this,” Rhett said, “I specifically told them not to ask us about the whole ‘incriminating photo’ fiasco. They’re not even going to mention it.”

Link knew this already, but he still couldn’t help feeling like he was going to have a panic attack. The whole uproar over the leaked photo had only just happened last week, and it was all too fresh in his mind. It had been traumatizing. 

They had been in the parking lot of their office building, next to a busy road. They really should have known better. But then again, their relationship had only just recently gone from friends to more than friends a matter of days before the photo incident. It was all so new, they were in love, and they weren’t thinking clearly. That fateful evening, as Link was getting into his car to drive home, Rhett had run outside and pulled him into a close embrace. In the photo that a nameless fan had taken, Rhett was smiling down at Link, whose back was turned to the camera, but it was clear to see that the brunet was kissing the taller man’s neck. There was no mistaking it. People on the Internet had proved it wasn’t photo-shopped, and then the whole thing blew up overnight. In a matter of days, pretty much all of their millions of fans had seen the photo on social media. Luckily, their subscriber count only grew after the incident.  
Flash forward to this interview, one week later. They had already scheduled it way before the photo scandal had occurred, and they were trying to save face by choosing not to back out of any obligations. So far, their strategy had just been to deny, deny, deny. They did not respond to comments about the photo. They did not acknowledge it. They had convinced their wives and family that it was clearly photo-shopped, and they had wholeheartedly believed them. Their families knew that people “shipped” them together anyway, and these kinds of photo-shopped images of them together was nothing new.

Except that this time…the photo was completely real. 

They heard the door to the office room open and Link jerked his head up, trying his best to lean back quickly and look natural. Rhett casually rested his arm on the back of the couch behind Link, a forced smile plastered onto his face.

They both shook hands with the interviewer, Colin, as he sat down in the chair opposite them in the small office room. He was a thin man in probably his late twenties, very well dressed, with jet-black hair and an infectious smile. The magazine he worked for focused on entrepreneurs and their success stories.

“Hello, you two!” Colin said flamboyantly. He was very charming, which got Rhett and Link to relax a little bit. “If you don’t mind, we’re running a little bit behind schedule today, so I’ll just get right to the questions if that’s okay.”

“Yeah, that’s fine,” said Rhett.

“Do what you gotta do, man,” said Link.

“Okay, great!” said Colin cheerfully, getting out a voice recorder and notebook. He turned the recorder on and set it on an end table next to him. “Let’s do this! So…when did you guys actually first meet?”

Rhett and Link both relaxed tremendously upon hearing this question. Pretty much every interviewer asked them about this, so they fell into the easy routine of explaining their very rehearsed backstory. The story was that they met in first grade, became best friends in detention, which was where the term “mythical beasts” originated from, etc. Colin was a great listener. Talking to him was easy, and they both loosened up more and more. They even started to laugh a little.

As the questions kept coming, Link began to wonder what he had been so worried about in the first place. Of course a reputable magazine wasn’t going to ask them questions about some ridiculous photo scandal. 

After quite some time, they were now finally nearing the end of the interview. 

“So,” Colin said, “you two have clearly done really well for yourselves. Your subscriber count is only growing. You just recently appeared on Jimmy Fallon.”

“Go on…” Rhett laughed jokingly. 

Link knew that Rhett loved having his ego stroked like this. He rolled his eyes in mock annoyance, but laughed with him.

Colin smiled. “I just have to ask, because…well, we can’t not talk about it guys, let’s be real. This photo that’s been circulating around the Internet of you two…obviously fake, right?”

Link felt his face fall as his heart started beating a million miles per hour. He felt Rhett stiffen up at his side. He racked his brain for an appropriate response. Surely Rhett would say something soon, right? Usually whenever Link faltered, Rhett always swept in to his rescue, offering up something funny to deflect the question…but this time they were both silent. A first. Link panicked. He had to say something soon. He couldn’t just let that question hang there with no response. It would look too suspicious.

Colin raised his eyebrows.

“Oh, no, that was totally real,” Link said with a smile. He thought that if he just made it into a joke, it would seem like they thought nothing of it.

Rhett immediately caught on. “Yep, completely real,” he said stiffly.

“Oh really?” Colin laughed.

“Yeah, that’s just kind of how we say goodbye at the end of the day. A little kiss on the cheek.” Link was now laughing along with him. Maybe a little too hard, to hide his nervousness. This was great. Colin clearly knew they were joking around and maybe he wouldn’t even put this part in the magazine publication.

Then Link felt it: Rhett’s lips on the side of his face giving him a quick peck on the cheek. His face fell as he looked at Rhett, his mouth open in shock.  
Rhett cleared his throat and leaned back on the couch. 

“See? No big deal.”

Colin’s eyebrows couldn’t have raised any higher as he gave an awkward laugh and scribbled something down in his notebook.

“Okay, well that was great, guys!” Colin said. He closed his notebook and shut off his voice recorder, then turned to shake both of their hands again. “I’ll have my people keep in touch with you about when this issue is coming out. Do you have any questions?”

Link glanced at Rhett again, waiting for him to say something about that last part. Waiting for him to ask about whether that last part would be in the magazine. Waiting for him to tell Colin not to put it in. Rhett only shifted uncomfortably in his seat.

“Nope, sounds good, man,” was all Rhett could muster. 

“Yep, we’ll be in touch,” said Link. He flashed a fake smile to Colin, his heart sinking at an alarming rate as he watched the dapper young main walk out of the office.

 

The two were silent for a while. They both sank into the couch and stared blankly at the floor, not knowing what to say.

Link finally sat up straight, angrily crossed his arms, and turned to look at his partner.

“Um, what the hell was that?” 

Rhett blinked at him, still slouched. “What?”

“You know what!” Link exploded on him. “Everything was going perfectly fine when he asked the question about the picture. I had him thinking we were just joking about it. And then you decide to kiss me?!” 

Link gestured wildly, waiting for any sort of response from the taller man. Rhett swallowed and looked down at the couch cushion.

“Well?” Link pressed. “What were you thinking? In what universe would that have made any sense for you to do?”

“I – I don’t know, man. I wasn’t thinking.”

“Obviously!” Link practically screeched. 

Rhett was done being yelled at. He finally straightened his posture and turned to lock eyes with Link, his dark eyebrows furrowed intensely.

“Look, this is hard, okay? When I’m with you…sometimes I can’t separate in my brain how I’m supposed to behave. When we’re in the office it’s fine for us to be all over each other, but when we’re with someone else, suddenly I can’t do that with you. And I just…I forgot, okay?”

“How could you just forget like that?” Link was incredulous. “You’re the one who told them not to mention the photo.”

“Yeah, but only because you were such a nervous wreck about this interview! You were the one who said you might not even come because you were so afraid that the truth would get out there.”

Link had to stand up. He couldn’t take this. He paced in front of the couch as Rhett’s eyes followed him back and forth.

“Well now the truth is out there, Rhett! All thanks to you. Everything was fine until you gave it away.”

“I said I was sorry! We were all just joking about it and laughing…I thought it would be like, part of the joke. I thought it would be okay.”

“You thought it would be okay...” Link almost had to laugh. “You know, usually I’m the one who does something stupid and gets yelled at. But this is just crazy. You’ve basically ruined us.”

Now it was Rhett’s turn to stand up. “What are you talking about? You are way overreacting right now.”

Link was still pacing, but he turned to Rhett. “No, you’re underreacting! You just kissed me in a magazine interview. That’s going to probably get published, and then the photo will be validated, and then everyone will know the truth, and then our families will find out and our wives will leave us and my kids will have to go to school getting teased about having two dads!”

“What…? What are you talking about? Two dads…?” Rhett grabbed Link by the shoulders to stop him from pacing all over the room. “You need to calm down.”  
Link threw Rhett’s hands off of him and said darkly, “Don’t you tell me to calm down, Rhett McLaughlin.”

They stood there for a few seconds, each of them staring intensely into each other’s faces. All of a sudden, Rhett was grabbing Link by the front of his shirt, pulling the brunet into a deep kiss that made him bend backwards. Link was so taken by surprise that he instinctively kissed him back, but then remembering that he was upset, wrestled himself out of Rhett’s powerful embrace. 

“What…?” Link began.

“Let’s go away together.”

Link momentarily forgot what they had just been arguing about. “Go away?” 

“Yes.” Rhett stressed. “I’m tired of hiding our new relationship from the world. It’s too much to think about. I just want to think about us for a while. Just you and me. Let’s go somewhere.”

Link felt a twinge of a smile on his face and tried his best to keep it from spreading. He started to feel light. Rhett was waiting for him to respond. His green eyes were pleading with all his heart. There was a long pause.

“Well…where do you want to go?”

Rhett couldn’t help but beam. He slowly approached Link and wrapped his arms around the shorter man’s shoulders. Link mirrored him so that his arms lazily draped around Rhett’s neck. He peered up into Rhett’s eyes, which looked almost like he was about to cry from smiling so hard.

“I don’t care. I’ll go anywhere with you.”

Their lips pressed together more gently this time, moving tenderly together in a passionate kiss that set Link’s heart ablaze and made him see fireworks behind his eyelids.

When the kiss broke, Rhett rested his forehead against Link’s. They were the perfect heights for him to be able to do this. Link loved how obviously their bodies seemed to be meant for loving each other this way.

“I don’t think we should worry about this interview thing,” Rhett said quietly. 

Link lifted his head so he could look into Rhett’s eyes. 

“I know, I’m just…I’m so scared about this getting out to the public,” said Link.

“I know.”

“I don’t want anyone in our families to find out about us. I’m not ready to face that yet.”

Rhett nodded.

“And…I didn’t mean to be so hard on you back there. I know this is confusing, and you were just trying to help. It’s confusing for me too.”

Rhett sighed and seemed to struggle a little bit with himself before speaking. “I know that this is complicated. But Link…” he pressed their foreheads together again, “I don’t want this to stop. I love you, and I want to be with you.” He pressed their foreheads together with passionate force, causing their noses to dance and rub against each other.

Link felt his chest swell and kissed him again. “I love you too,” he said in between gasps for air. They attacked each other’s mouths recklessly.

After more minutes of rough, fiery kissing, Rhett had to force himself to pull away. He had a smirk on his face.

“You keep kissing me like that Neal, and we might have a situation on our hands.”

Link smirked back mischievously. He grabbed Rhett and pulled him down so that he could whisper in his ear, “I’ll take your situation in my hands.”

“Oh-ho-ho,” Rhett chuckled at the bad innuendo, but the way Link had whispered it into his ear with a sultry voice still made him feel tight in his pants. “We’d better get out of here.”

“Yes, let’s.” 

Link held Rhett’s hand and led him across the room to the office door, but forced himself to let go as soon as he swung the door open.


End file.
